Oliver Kamm

Did Benedict XVI need to apologise at Auschwitz? Is the Pope Catholic?

This article appears in The Times today.

“IT IS PARTICULARLY difficult for a Pope that comes from Germany to come here,” said Pope Benedict XVI at Auschwitz at the weekend. The difficulty lies in his being Pope more than being German — even a German of his generation. Benedict’s praying for forgiveness in his native language has been widely remarked on, but it was an apt gesture.

The agency directly responsible for the death camps — Nazi tyranny — was shattered and defeated 60 years ago. No fair critic would hold Benedict culpable for his involuntary conscription in the Hitler Youth. There is, moreover, no more civilised and tolerant nation than postwar Germany.

The potent image of Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling, in 1970, before the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto symbolises the nation’s atonement for the Holocaust. The achievement of German statesmen in building a “militant democracy” purged of xenophobia and authoritarianism is to this day not properly recognised in the English-speaking world.

Yet the Roman Catholic Church, which was not at all an agent of genocide and whose adherents included many heroic benefactors and rescuers of Jews, continues to be the subject of vigorous historical debate concerning its role in those dark times. The paradox needs explaining, and resolving.

The Pope’s prayer at Auschwitz asked where God had been during the Holocaust. For some of us, the question is an ineradicable obstacle to religious faith, but it is still nothing like as tough a question for Christians as where God had been in the preceding two millennia. Why did God, with omniscient knowledge of the suffering to come, not move his followers to abjure the imagery of anti-Semitism? Catholic sins in that ignoble history are not only ones of omission.

The Second Vatican Council, opened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, historically renounced the notion of a collective guilt on the part of the Jews for the death of Jesus, and denounced “all outbreaks of hatred, persecutions and manifestations of anti-Semitism which have been directed against the Jews at any time by anyone”. But there is an irreducible element in the New Testament that holds the Jews culpable for the rejection of Christ.

How could it be otherwise? God selected the Jews to prepare for His Coming. Jesus announced that he was “not sent but unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel”. He drew a band of disciples, all of them Jews and one of them the man whom Catholics regard as their first Pope. Yet the Jews, merely by remaining Jews, rejected him. When the lethal accusation of deicide is removed from Christian orthodoxy, this brute historical fact remains. Even 20th-century Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, in his book A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, could not rid themselves of the assumption that the Jews are somehow historically aberrant.

At Auschwitz, of all places, Benedict might have referred to the biblical and Catholic roots of European anti-Semitism. He preferred to concentrate on the heroism of Catholic witnesses against Nazism. The picture he gave was thereby highly misleading.

The Pope prayed in the cell where a Polish Franciscan, Maximillian Kolbe, was starved and incarcerated before being murdered by the Nazis. Kolbe was canonised by Pope John Paul II. Yet Kolbe’s writings evince a firm belief in the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the existence of a Masonic-Jewish conspiracy. John Paul’s canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a nun and died at Auschwitz, caused still more trouble. The Church’s celebration of martyrs against Nazi barbarism is unerringly partial. It decries the blasphemous claims of authority, while sparing few words for the integrity of Jewish history.

This is why the Church’s witness at Auschwitz and elsewhere causes at least as much friction as amity. Hitler retained a certain respect for the outward forms of the Catholic Church, its history and ritual, and explicitly aimed to avoid open confrontation with it. Recent polemic against the wartime Vatican — that the reigning Pope Pius XII was somehow “Hitler’s Pope” — has been a model of overstatement. It has been countered by Catholic apologists talking up Pius’s actual acts of defiance — attempting to halt deportations in some occupied countries — and emphasising the pagan elements of Nazism. But the implied question about Christian responsibility is a good one. As the philosopher Emil Fackenheim, a refugee from Nazism, observed: “For Christians, the first priority may be theological self-understanding. For Jews it is, and after Auschwitz must be, simple safety for their children.”

Pope Benedict pointed at Auschwitz to literally the worst crime of our age, which was committed by those who certainly considered themselves emancipated from superstition, and the agents of supposedly scientific notions of race.

But no amount of theological reflection will render future generations immune from the atavistic forces that aimed at the destruction of every last Jew in Europe, and to which the Church certainly made a historical contribution. I have no interest at all in the fortunes of Judaism, but a great concern in the resilience of historically persecuted peoples. Only by removing the accumulated detritus of malign ideologies can that happen.

Organised religion, even in the form of so learned a man as Pope Benedict, is one of the obstacles. Revealed truth cannot be discarded, precisely because it does not come from human reason: it can only be accepted or rationalised. Yet revelation turns out to be a highly unreliable guide. There was no revelation to the Catholic faithful till Vatican II that the Jews were not Christ-killers. There has never yet been a divine revelation, to my knowledge, that freedom of speech, tolerance and religious liberty are values to be prized and defended. If there ever is, it will paradoxically be because the way liberal civilisation operates has superseded the traditional religious imagination. It is time it did.

Reaction on Guardian/Chomsky

I thought I had finished on this subject, but Stephen Glover in his media column in today's Independent gets the Guardian/Chomsky imbroglio exactly right. Please do read the whole thing for an accurate summary, before it disappears behind a subscription barrier:

Some people may be impressed that a newspaper should be able to concede in public that one of its own writers had got something wrong. The trouble is that it is by no means clear that she did. Diana Johnstone's views about Srebenica are controversial, and Professor Chomsky appears to have given them a measure of endorsement. It seems unfair that Emma Brockes (whom I have never met nor spoken to) should be hung out to dry.

My suspicion is that Solomon Mayes was slightly in awe of "the world's leading public intellectual" (what vulgar conception that is!) and possibly unnerved by the torrent of angry e-mails that descended on him. His great office can, however, never be called into question.

The newspaper may make mistakes, but the ombudsman is not allowed to. If The Guardian really had been interested in establishing the truth, it would have encouraged Mr Willis to reconsider Professor Chomsky's original complaint in the light of the evidence adduced by Messrs Aaronovitch, Kamm and Wheen in their letter. Not for the first time, the paper is not as high-minded as it may seem.

Guardian and Chomsky, concluded

I was waiting, after yesterday's post, to see if The Guardian would print our letter summarising this subject. The letters editor has, as is his prerogative, replied that the newspaper considers the matter closed. I'm thus posting our unpublished letter here.

We share the perplexity of The Guardian’s external ombudsman, John Willis, at the removal from your website of Emma Brockes’s interview with Noam Chomsky, and the publication of an opinion piece by Diana Johnstone as if Ms Johnstone were a wronged party. The interview should be reinstated, and Ms Johnstone’s pernicious ventures in ‘Srebrenica-denial’ receive the critical scrutiny that The Guardian, of all newspapers, is competent to make.

But Willis’s report is handicapped by the restriction of its remit. Willis investigated the way in which the readers’ editor, Ian Mayes, handled Chomsky’s complaint. Our objection was not about the procedure but about the judgement. As we have shown in our letter to Mayes (available on the websites of two of us) and elsewhere, Chomsky is a fundamentally unreliable guide to his own political history, which on this issue is a lot closer to Ms Johnstone’s position than it has been expedient for him to concede.

Another newspaper that carried the interview, the South African Mail & Guardian, concluded after a similar lobbying effort by Chomsky’s supporters, “Chomsky does try to minimise the Srebrenica atrocity… Brockes cannot be accused of misrepresenting his essential position.” That issue remains unconsidered by The Guardian, as does the oddity that in his judgements the readers’ editor appears to be accountable to no one.

David Aaronovitch
Oliver Kamm
Francis Wheen

Willis is explicit on this point in his report, as he was to me when I met him during his investigation. His remit did not extend to the "complex underlying historical debate", only to the way Mayes had investigated Chomsky's complaint. We have never disputed the procedure Mayes adopted: we take issue with what he said, because it was wrong. That remains the case, and our principal objection - that Diana Johnstone says what she does, and Chomsky says about her "research" what he does, and that Emma Brockes's interview was fair comment on both - remains unconsidered. We are, however, glad to have established that the interview ought not to have been withdrawn from The Guardian's site, and look forward to its speedy reinstatement.

Guardian and Chomsky, once more

The Guardian reports today:

The Guardian readers' editor, Ian Mayes, was right to publish an apology and correction relating to a G2 interview with Professor Noam Chomsky, according to an independent outside review.

The Guardian's external ombudsman, John Willis, looked into the handling of the Chomsky controversy after complaints that the correction had been unfounded. After talking to all sides, Mr Willis concluded that Mayes had behaved independently and correctly in publishing the correction. "This was a serious matter," Mr Willis said.

"Overall the newspaper took both the complaint from Chomsky and later from others extremely conscientiously. It is ironic that they are entertaining a complaint about their process when so few newspapers have any independent process at all."

The Guardian's ombudsman did suggest, however, that Mayes had gone too far in deciding to remove the original Chomsky interview from the website. Such a move was unnecessary, Mr Willis said.

The complaint in question was this one, written by David Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen and me. The full report by the external ombudsman is published on The Guardian's website here (the link from the news report is wrong). I shall be commenting on this report in the next day or two, but here I just draw to your attention what the newspaper is saying.

Keeping the faith

It's at this time of year that I ask this sort of question.

Where would you go if you wanted to hear at a public event someone who believes the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is an accurate depiction of the state of modern America? ("American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.") That, where Holocaust 'revisionists' (i.e. deniers) such as David Irving are concerned, there just aren't enough of them? ("If history shapes the future, we need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting revisionists [i.e. Holocaust deniers], we simply need many more of them.") That Holocaust deniers, instead of being frauds and charlatans, "engage themselves in detailed archive work as well as forensic scrutiny"?

If you guessed the Ku Klux Klan or David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People, you would be venturing a shrewd but mistaken judgement. If you guessed the British National Party, you would be closer - very close indeed, in fact - but still wrong. The correct answer is the annual Marxism jamboree, this year to be held from 6-10 July, of the Socialist Workers' Party. For the third year running, "acclaimed jazz musician Gilad Atzmon" will be entertaining the proceedings with his very own - in reality, highly traditional - brand of crank racism.

I referred just before the municipal elections this month to the ideological identity of the Respect 'Coalition', which is the electoral front for the Socialist Workers' Party, and the BNP. Atzmon is not an aberrant eccentric within this political culture. There was a time when the SWP, in the form of its predecessor organisation, held a view of Middle East politics that was other-worldly but not racist (something like the views of the early Noam Chomsky in his 1973 book Peace in the Middle East). But the current SWP has no difficulty in commending Atzmon's bigotry as "fearless tirades against Zionism". Respect/SWP and the BNP are not merely comparably repellent organisations: they stand for the same thing.

The uses of euphemism

George Orwell wrote of the tendency whereby "political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness". As we're on the subject of the Socialist Workers' Party - a modern instance of a minority Marxist tendency to cross over to the unabashedly racist politics of the far-Right - I can give a predictable example from this week's edition of the party's newspaper. One Mike Haynes writes about the playwright Maxim Gorky, and concludes:

Gorky did not see that the poverty forced on Russia’s masses by Stalin undercut any real possibility of change. In 1932 Stalin invited him back again [from exile in Italy]. He returned to Russia for the last time. Now the regime was able to use him as a propaganda weapon. In private Gorky’s doubts began to grow, but by then it was too late. He was trapped intellectually and politically.

Gorky really is a substantial figure of European literature. His autobiographical writings, his play The Lower Depths and his novel Mother are in particular outstanding works. But that doesn't mean it's legitimate to bury Gorky's political record in evasions of his culpability as a propagandist for Stalin.

I'd recommend in this context a book called Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal, 1998, by Cynthia A. Ruder. Belomor was the abbreviated name for the Baltic-White Sea Canal. It was a garguantuan, brutal and - as it turned out - almost entirely useless project of Stalin's that was begun in 1930 and built by slave-labour. Ruder's book gives not only the history of this grotesque project but an account of the literary works written to celebrate it. She remarks (p. xi): "Foremost among these is The History of the Construction of Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal, a volume notorious in the annals of Russian literary history...." Gorky was one of three editors of this book, which, astonishngly, celebrated Belomor as a humanitarian achievement. In his outstanding biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003, p. 106), Simon Sebag Montefiore records that of 170,000 workers who began construction of the canal, 25,000 died within the first 18 months.

Those who were "trapped" in this hell-on-earth were the slave-labourers hacking out solid rock. But if you're hacking out an article for Socialist Worker, your sympathies are liable to be otherwise engaged.

"... where I am repeatedly insulted"

In the three years that this blog has been in existence I have once had cause to quote the writings of a ponderous ideologue called Ian Birchall. Birchall is the author of an aged semi-official history of the Socialist Workers' Party called, with inadvertently comic grandiloquence, The Smallest Mass Party in the World. The esoteric reason for referring to this work was to illustrate the difference in political terminology between 'fraction' and 'faction'. For people like Birchall, the distinction is of great moment and religiously observed. I cited him in support of my contention that the correct English translation of the German Rote Armee Fraktion is Red Army Fraction, and not Faction. (I have never claimed that this blog is a racy read.)

Well, Birchall has suddenly emerged from obscurity. Polly Toynbee wrote a few days ago on The Guardian's Comment is Free site about the columnist's occupational hazard of receiving hatemail:

By the way, if anyone knows someone called Ian Birchall, do please tell me about him. He just sent me this email, all in capital letters, which would have been struck from this site: "You are a loathsome overpaid hypocrite. Nobody would miss you for 5 seconds if you were dead like your despicable shitball husband. I should like to see you in a cancer ward screaming with pain and vomiting blood.' His email is ian@ibirchall.wanadoo.co.uk. No, I didn't reply to that one.

(Polly Toynbee's late husband was the influential political journalist Peter Jenkins.)

Birchall has now posted a comment to Harry's Place to explain his email, and - wondrously - to complain that he has found personally insulting certain comments posted on that site. I won't try to summarise Birchall's message; I urge you to follow the link and read it for yourself. You won't regret it.

More on the Stalin Note

I commented in the previous post about the hypothesis, presented as fact by Noam Chomsky, that the Stalin Note of 1952 represented a missed opportunity to reduce superpower tension. I mentioned that archive material released in the 1990s had not dealt kindly with this theory.

One of my regular correspondents, an academic historian specialising in the Cold War, kindly draws my attention to this monograph, published in 1996 under the auspices of the Cold War International History Project, which usefully summarises the debate and the evidence. Its author, Ruud Van Dijk of Ohio University, comments:

In the debate over "1952" it has often been forgotten that in 1952, in spite of all the anxieties about the country's division, the Federal Republic knew a wide consensus on the Germany policy of the Western allies and Chancellor Adenauer, and the credibility of Stalin's regime was extremely low. This amnesia has caused later combatants to attribute much greater sincerity to Stalin than his contemporaries gave him credit for. With the help of East German and Soviet archival materials, we are now learning that Stalin's Western contemporaries were correct. Today, there is enough evidence to assert that "1952" was not a wasted opportunity. The Stalin-note was not an opportunity for unification and can therefore not have been "wasted." The debate may continue, it most probably will, but it will be increasingly difficult to argue the opposite.

Another regular correspondent - my most frequent correspondent of anyone, ever, who writes under the nom de keyboard 'Mr1001nights' - writes yet again, with his views on this issue:

You say that if the 1952 proposal had been accepted Germany would have been "formally neutral but in practice influenced by the Soviet Union [which] would have been an intolerable threat." This argument is so irrational! A neutral Germany would have eased tensions between the US &USSR. Since the elections would have been LOST by the Communists, only a totally irrational apparatchik like you could come away with the conclusion that allowing Germany to be independent would be "intolerable."

The real "intolerable threat" was the nuclear build up that was created as result of the US provokation of a cold war, which would serve it well as an excuse to control the American population, stimulate the economy through pentagon spending and intervene to crush 3rd world independence with the sham excuse of "fighting Communism"

Your contempt for independence and self-determination in Germany is shameful. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I have written back endeavouring to explain that 'independence' and 'neutrality' are not synonyms. A state may be independent and part of an alliance (as well as the UN, the EU, the G8 and so on), like the Federal Republic of Germany, and it may be neutral but have its independence severely compromised, like post-war Finland. A united and neutral Germany in the early 1950s would have been at best comparable to Finland, a country whose foreign policy and domestic political culture required a willingness to defer to Soviet wishes.

Chomsky on Milosevic, Stalin and Germany

Stimulated by the Guardian diarist's interest in the matter, I'd better get round to the promised comment on Noam Chomsky's interview posted this month on the ZNet site. The interview is conducted by a Lebanese journalist, and coincides with Chomsky's visit this month to Lebanon and the publication of his latest book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

I have been reading Chomsky's political output for a long time, and I'm modestly pleased to find that I am not so inured to the master's reasoning to fail to be surprised by his judgements. For example, the reason Nato bombed Serbia in 1999 was, according to the interview, that "Serbia was not adopting the proper social and economic reforms". Go and check, if you think I've manufactured this fantastic and pitiful assertion.

Chomsky claims certain knowledge on this point from "the highest level of the Clinton administration". We must therefore assume - which is why I believe that normal canons of political debate break down at this point, as they must when conspiracy theories enter the discussion - that the administration intended its pre-1999 approach to Kosovo to appear irresolute and Micawberish, the better to lure Milosevic into inadvertently creating a pretext for Nato's economic aggression. Certainly the pretence was well disguised. It extended even to the desultory attempt by Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's special envoy for the Balkans, in October 1998 to broker an agreement with Milosevic whereby Serb forces would end their attacks on Kosovars (hundreds of thousands of whom had fled their homes). As Ivo Daalder (who served on the National Security Council staff as director for European affairs in the mid-1990s, and was responsible for coordinating US policy for Bosnia) and Michael Hanlon wrote in their study of the Kosovo War, Winning Ugly (2000, p. 23):

[W]hatever Nato commitment existed to enforce compliance with [the agreement's] terms was effectively nullified by the decision to deploy unarmed monitors to the region. Consistent with US and European efforts throughout the crisis, the Holbrooke mission was one more indication that the aim was less to find a viable and lasting solution to the conflict than to push the final reckoning as far into the future as possible.

The begetter of that final reckoning, without whom no Kosovo War would have taken place, was Slobodan Milosevic. He was the author, if not the agent, of a campaign of terror against ethnic Albanians.

Chomsky's conspiracy theories take increasingly startling forms, but they are not an aberrant feature of his work. It's always been like this. Later in the interview, for example, he sketches his view of the history of post-war transatlantic relations:

If you look back over the past decades, a major concern of US policy –and it’s very clear in internal planning—is that Europe might strike an independent course. During the cold war period, US was afraid Europe might follow what they called “a third way,” and many mechanisms were used to inhibit any intention on the part of Europe to follow an independent course. That goes right back to the final days of World War II and its immediate aftermath, when US and Britain intervened, in some cases quite violently, to suppress the anti-fascist resistance and restore tradition [sic] structures, including fascist-Nazi collaborators. Germany was reconstructed pretty much the same way. The unwillingness to accept a unified neutral Germany in the 1950s was predicated on the same thinking. We don’t know if that would have been possible, but Stalin did offer a unified Germany which would have democratic elections which he was sure to lose, but on condition that it would not be part of a hostile military alliance. However, the US was not willing to tolerate a unified Germany.

Let us leave aside for a later post Chomsky's fabulous assertion about the final days of WW2. This is quite a recent claim of his, making its first appearance in a New Yorker profile of him in 2003. The claim about Stalin's German diplomacy has a longer pedigree in Chomsky's catalogue of tendentious historical counterexamples, having been first advanced, I believe, in Deterring Democracy, 1991.

What Chomsky is alluding to (though he does not call it this) is the so-called Stalin Note of 1952. Chomsky depicts it as a proposal that, if implemented, "would have eliminated whatever military threat the Soviet Union might have posed to Western Europe" but also crucially entailed "no ready justification for US intervention and subversion worldwide". It thus stands in a history of "apparent opportunities to reduce the threat of superpower confrontation" that the West spurned. Chomsky adds darkly: "For years these matters were off the agenda; even to mention the facts was to risk being castigated as an apologist for Stalin. By 1989-90, however, Stalin's proposal could be cited quite freely in the press and journals." The reason it could now be discussed, according to Chomsky, was so that an apparently new proposal by Mikhail Gorbachev for a neutral reunified Germany could be dismissed as well-worn. (Quotations from Deterring Democracy, pp. 24-5.)

It is astonishing and faintly scandalous that a serious publisher (Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House) was found for this farrago, and that it is still in print. If Chomsky believes that the Stalin Note was "off the agenda" till the end of the Cold War, then he must pay scant attention to German historical debate. The historian Rolf Steininger argued forcefully in his book Eine Chance zur Wiedervereinigung? Die Stalin-Note vom 10. März 1952 that the West missed a genuine opportunity with this proposal. The book was published in 1985, when no one had any conception that the Berlin Wall would fall in the same decade. So far from being dismissed as Stalinist apologetic, Steininger's book was treated quite properly as a thesis to be examined on its merits. As it turns out, Soviet and East German archive material released in the 1990s has not dealt kindly with Steininger's argument, and has largely substantiated the view that Stalin had no intention of accepting a genuinely democratic unified Germany. So Chomsky's claim that Stalin's diplomacy was a "secret history" in the West till unification is wrong, while his assertion that "we don't know" if a unified and neutral Germany could have been obtained is, like any historical counterfactual, literally true, but heedless of recent historical research.

But the essence of Chomsky's political approach is revealed in another facet of this issue. In his comments about the Stalin Note in Deterring Democracy, Chomsky says that the notion of a unified Germany free to join Nato was "a demand that the Russians could hardly accept a few years after Germany alone had virtually destroyed the Soviet Union". It is extraordinary that, being so solicitous of the victims of German aggression, Chomsky should fail to mention the view from a nation that had been defeated and occupied in WW2. France had a perfectly reasonable, because historically grounded, fear of a repeat of the Rapallo agreement of 1922 or the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. A united and armed Germany that was formally neutral but in practice influenced by the Soviet Union would have been an intolerable threat. (The Note proposed that a neutral Germany have sufficient armed forces "for the defence of the country"; this was a useless because largely subjective criterion.)

Why does Chomsky not mention the reasonable security needs and legitimate apprehensions of a Western democratic nation? Because to read Chomsky on history is to be in the presence of a propagandist and not a scholar. On the back of my edition of Deterring Democracy is an encomium to the author from John Pilger, which reads: "This book ... ought to be required reading in schools and newsrooms for it cuts through the often subtle propaganda about our times...." As a sociological case-study of entirely unsubtle propaganda - sanitised official history as it might have been written if the wrong side had won the Cold War - Chomsky's writings may indeed merit a place in schools and newsrooms. I do my utmost to discover in Chomsky's political writings any other redeeming characteristic, and I must tell my readers that I ceaselessly fail.

Email of the week

Yes, another one, for this comes from my single most frequent correspondent. He writes to me all the time, under the Delphic title 'Mr1001nights'. This may not be his real name, for he signs himself elsewhere as 'Jonathan'. He regards me as a successor to John Stuart Mill, and speculates that this blog may live for 100 years:

CHOMSKY HAS CRUSHED YOU You look like an obnoxious fly trying to refute Chomsky. You are too brainwashed to understand what he writes about. You are some kind of 2nd rate John Stuart Mill of the 21st century; you sound like he did when he wrote his bullshit essay on non-intervention. That's exactly how people will look at your work 100 years from now--if they bother to look at it at all. They'll laugh at how pathetic and subservient to power it is, and they'll embrace Chomsky's work as self-evident.

UPDATE: My thanks to Michael B for finding Jonathan's customer page at Amazon.com. The reviews do make interesting reading, and I say that even though I hear from Jonathan more frequently than I hear from my mother. (Large passages of the reviews have been cut-and-pasted without attribution from online interviews with Noam Chomsky, but you can distinguish these owing to the dramatic improvement in Jonathan's syntax and grammar.)